Basing ourselves in the town of Moab, we visited beautiful Arches National Park in early June 2018. Arches National Park is only about 8kms from Moab.

Take a look at our Arches National Park slideshow.

To experience Arches National Park the best place to start is at the Visitor Center at the entrance to the park. Pick up a map/brochure for the park and have a chat to one of the Rangers for advice on what to see in the time you have.

Park Avenue, Arches National Park

Arches National Park has one entrance/exit and a scenic road (Arches Scenic Drive) from the entrance of the park at the Visitor Center to Devils Garden Campground & Trailhead – a distance of about 30 kms. There are two short side roads off Arches Scenic Drive – one to the Windows section of the park, and the other to Delicate Arch.

There are lots of places along Scenic Drive to stop for photos and for short or long walks (the longest maintained trail in the Park is 11.5kms – the Devils Garden Trail).

The scenery is amazing – natural arches, balancing rocks, spires, vertical rocks (fins), mesas – it is a beautiful landscape of Entrada Sandstone shaped and formed over 100 million years by nature’s elements.

North Window in the Windows section of Arches National Park

We spent about six hours in Arches NP and were able to drive the whole park, stopping to see many of the main sights and do a couple of short walks.

Arches National Park is open 24 hours a day. The beauty of that is you can visit early or late in the day to avoid the crowds and the heat. The Park gets very crowded between March and October – and that means queuing in your car at the entrance and having difficulty finding a place to park on the scenic road inside the park.

We visited in June when daylight hours are long. We spent two late afternoons in the park (entering just after 5pm) – there were no crowds and the light was beautiful.

Skyline Arch

Highlights of Arches National Park include:

  • Park Avenue – great photos from the viewpoint
  • Courthouse Towers – from the road and overlook we can see the Tower of Babel, the Organ, Sheep Rock and the Three Gossips.
  • Petrified Dunes – can be seen on the right hand side of the road driving north
  • The Great Wall – can be seen close to the road
  • Balanced Rock – we took the short walk to get a closer view
  • North & South Windows – worth the 1.8km return walk
  • Garden of Eden – can be seen on the Windows Road
  • Wolfe Ranch – we missed this!
  • Delicate Arch – we saw it at a distance from viewpoint on Scenic Drive. The walk to Delicate Arch is 4.8kms return and the trail climbs 148 metres.
  • Fiery Furnace – short walk to viewpoint
  • Skyline Arch – short walk from Scenic Drive
  • Devils Garden – we walked the first 1.3km of the main trail to view Landscape Arch

There is no accommodation in Arches National Park – except for camping at Devils Garden. The lovely little town of Moab is a perfect base for a visit to Arches National Park, as well as Canyonland National Park and Dead Horse Point State Park.

We can recommend the reasonably priced Virginia Motel in Moab for your stay.

AccommodationGuru.com
6-7 June 2018